American Merchant Ships and Sailors eBook

New England early took the lead in building ships
and manning them, and this was but natural since her
coasts abounded in harbors; navigable streams ran
through forests of trees fit for the ship-builder’s
adze; her soil was hard and obdurate to the cultivator’s
efforts; and her people had not, like those who settled
the South, been drawn from the agricultural classes.
Moreover, as I shall show in other chapters, the sea
itself thrust upon the New Englanders its riches for
them to gather. The cod-fishery was long pursued
within a few miles of Cape Ann, and the New Englanders
had become well habituated to it before the growing
scarcity of the fish compelled them to seek the teeming
waters of Newfoundland banks. The value of the
whale was first taught them by great carcasses washed
up on the shore of Cape Cod, and for years this gigantic
game was pursued in open boats within sight of the
coast. From neighborhood seafaring such as this
the progress was easy to coasting voyages, and so to
Europe and to Asia.

There is some conflict of historians over the time
and place of the beginning of ship-building in America.
The first vessel of which we have record was the “Virginia,”
built at the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1608,
to carry home a discontented English colony at Stage
Island. She was a two-master of 30 tons burden.
The next American vessel recorded was the Dutch “yacht”
“Onrest,” built at New York in 1615.
Nowadays sailors define a yacht as a vessel that carries
no cargo but food and champagne, but the “Onrest”
was not a yacht of this type. She was of 16 tons
burden, and this small size explains her description.

The first ship built for commercial purposes in New
England was “The Blessing of the Bay,”
a sturdy little sloop of 60 tons. Fate surely
designed to give a special significance to this venture,
for she was owned by John Winthrop, the first of New
England statesmen, and her keel was laid on the Fourth
of July, 1631—­a day destined after the lapse
of one hundred and forty-five years to mean much in
the world’s calendar. Sixty tons is not
an awe-inspiring register. The pleasure yacht
of some millionaire stock-jobber to-day will be ten
times that size, while 20,000 tons has come to be
an every-day register for an ocean vessel; but our
pleasure-seeking “Corsairs,” and our castellated
“City of New York” will never fill so
big a place in history as this little sloop, the size
of a river lighter, launched at Mistick, and straightway
dispatched to the trade with the Dutch at New Amsterdam.
Long before her time, however, in 1526, the Spanish
adventurer, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, losing on the
coast of Florida a brigantine out of the squadron
of three ships which formed his expedition, built
a small craft called a gavarra to replace it.